Apple Announces Touch ID

Leon Hitchens

6 years ago

The most rumored featured of the iPhone was the fingerprint scanner built into the home button. Today, the scanner is true and called Touch ID. The scanner has a capacitive sensor that’s 170 microns thin and scans your sub-epidermal skin layers with 500 ppi resolution. The canner can read your fingerprint 360 degrees so it will allow you to read your fingerprint no matter how you put your finger on the home button. The scan can be used to verify purchases but Apple says it’s “never stored on Apple servers or backed up to iCloud.”

The home button is made out of sapphire, which allows for no scratches. If one scratch occurs the system would no longer work, and you would have to take it into an Apple store to get a replacement or get it repaired. The problem next is how accurate the scanner is, because we don’t want to swipe your finger 5 times before it recognises it’s the right user. We also don’t want the device to let others in because their fingerprint is similar. It’s a fine line, that we won’t understand till users are using it and people start to report issues.

If you want the iPhone 5S, it will start at $199 for the 16GB model on a two-year contract, with 32GB for $299 and 64GB for $399. It’ll go on sale September 20th. There is a lot to understand with all the news just coming in, but so far it looks like a huge improvement has been made. The Touch ID is a novel idea, that most users won’t want to use. Tell us what you think about Apple having a fingerprint scanner on the iPhone, but they have yet to include standards like NFC in their phones.